NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Reasons To Celebrate…

I’ll admit it - when it comes to health news, I tend to fixate on the negative instead of the positive.  I worry about the germs or the .0000001% chance that I’ll develop a disease from some chemical I’ve been exposed to, rather than celebrate all the advancements that have been made in medicine over the years.

However, recently, a few articles have forced me to focus on the positive.  First, there was an announcement about how targeting cancer treatments to a patient’s specific genes offers extraordinary hope for personalized cures.  Another study further proved that statins are a tremendously powerful shield against heart attack and stroke.  (A friend re-affirmed the importance of this news the other night by mentioning a leading heart surgeon they knew personally who raved about the life-saving ability of statins.)  Then there was the 60 Minutes story on someone who could use their brain to convey thoughts directly to  a computer.  And finally, a piece that profiled the Kanzius machine which - if clinical trials prove successful - will zap cancer cells all through your body without the need for drugs or surgery and without side effects.

All reasons to feel hopeful, right?  Yet it seems as a nation, we still seem to cling to ungrounded fears about risk and disease more than we celebrate medical breakthroughs.  Perhaps it’s because we’ve lost trust in institutions as a whole, the medical industry being no exception.  We feel we’ve been lied to, manipulated, and let down, so no information can be “good” or trusted.  We’re so saturated with conflicting information that we don’t know what to trust anymore, and that confusion paralyzes us and makes us fearful.

While I recognize this tendency in my own life, I am going to make an effort to change my habits.  We live in an era of unprecedented innovation in medicine - will you join me in being excited about it?